Philip Gefter and Mike Mandel

Artist lecture Saturday, March 15, 2014 7PMTimken Lecture Hall, California College of the Arts, San Francisco

Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, Oranges on Fire, 1975

Philip Gefter is an author and photography critic. He was on staff at The New York Times for more than fifteen years, where as page one picture editor and then senior picture editor for culture, he wrote regularly about photography. Early in his career, Gefter was a picture editor at Fortune and an Assistant Editor at Aperture. In 2010, he produced the award-winning documentary Bill Cunningham New York. The recipient of a Museum Scholar residency at the Getty Research Institute, he has recently completed a biography of curator-collector, Sam Wagstaff.

Mike Mandel grew up in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley during a period of expansion and transformation of the landscape that included the appearance of billboards, strip malls, and miles of freeways. This experience informs much of his work, which questions the meaning of photographic imagery within popular culture and draws from snapshots, advertising, news photographs, and public and corporate archives.

In 1977, Mandel and Larry Sultan collaborated on the seminal photographic book Evidence, comprised of file photographs from engineering, corporate and government agencies. Over a period of twenty-five years, Mandel and Sultan designed both temporary and permanent artworks specifically for public sites. Their collaboration has been documented in a recent monograph Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel (2012).

Since the early 1990s, Mandel has worked extensively on public art projects transforming photographic imagery into large scale glass and ceramic tile mosaic murals. He has been awarded several NEA grants and a Fulbright Fellowship. This spring, he will serve as a visiting lecturer on Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.

Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program

Pier 24 Photography is pleased to present the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program in collaboration with California College of the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Each year, the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program brings six photographers, writers, and curators to San Francisco to offer free and open lectures, and to work one-on-one with students at California College of the Arts.

Bieke Depoorter

Photographer Bieke Depoorter (b. 1986, Belgium) travels the world to find her subjects, creating extraordinarily intimate photographs that straddle portraiture, documentary, and fiction. The relationships she creates with those she photographs are the key to her work. As Depoorter describes it, “The relationships I establish with my subjects are the foundation of my artistic practice…. The resulting stories are always partially mine, partially theirs.”

In her early work, Depoorter traveled to far-flung locales in Russia, Egypt, and the United States, befriending locals to photograph. She asked her subjects if she could spend the night in their homes, building rapport and trust that eventually allowed her to capture the mundane, routine, ordinary moments of their lives. Depoorter’s first such project, Ou Menya, documented her encounters in the homes of locals in Russia. She completed a similar, long-term project in the United States titled I am about to call it a day.

In As It May Be, a project photographed in Egypt beginning just after the revolution in 2011, she tried to find trust in a time of turmoil and suspicion, in an environment where private life is often shielded. With this project, she also started to question her use of the photographic medium. Conscious of her status as an outsider, she returned to Egypt in 2017 with the first draft of the book, inviting others to write comments directly on the photographs. Contrasting views on country, religion, society, and photography arise among people who would otherwise never engage in a dialogue with one another. In Sete#15 (2015) and the short film Dvalemodus (2017), she began to conceive of her subjects as actors, projecting her own fictional narratives onto her subjects’ factual environments, thereby blurring the line between her world and theirs. In her most recent projects, such as the ongoing project Agata (2017), Depoorter works even more collaboratively with her subjects.

She has published four books, and her work has been shown in the United States and Europe, including Photomuseum The Hague, The Netherlands and an upcoming exhibition at FOMU Antwerp, Belgium. She joined the Magnum agency as a nominee in 2012 and a full member in 2016. She is the recipient of the Magnum Expression award and the Prix levallois, among other accolades.